End of the Semester

Well, the semester has ended. This past week was really stressful and long getting all of the grades together for my 200 students. Also we had there final tests to check, and I can now sympathize with all of those English teachers out there who check essays for grammar and content. But thank God, I am finished and now it is break time.

We have 3 weeks off for Chinese New Year, and I will have an opportunity to travel. I am going to South Korea for 3 days to visit my good friend Tom. Also, I will have the chance to go to Thailand for 6 days. I am very excited for both trips, and will be taking a lot of pictures.

One picture, before I go. Every other Saturday, students of Concordia come to school in the morning for 2 periods of club time and 2 periods of class. On campus there are many clubs. I have visited several including guitar club, drama club, dancing club, economics club, volunteer club, greenhouse/animal club, and various sports clubs. Another club is the Coffee Club. Students make coffe and also have some breakfast during this club. I have 6 or 7 students who are in this club, so I have stopped by a couple of times to see what they were doing. A bonus of course is that they immediately give me coffee, a small piece of the breakfast, and chair to relax in. To show my appreciation, sometime next semester I am going to try to make French Toast for them.

In the meantime, here's a picture of me with some of those students. I am holding a cup of coffee that they made.

January 15th

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. Yes boys and girls it has been quite awhile since I posted on my blog, but now I am back.

For this entry I want to reflect on the Christmas season. This holiday season was a true joy for me. I was extremely busy preparing many things for school and church, it all of it came full circle when Christmas came. It was not at all a commercial Christmas. The entire focus of the holiday was telling the Christmas story to bring people closer to the Gospel of Jesus. This was done through songs, skits, readings, and countless number of conversations. These were done both at school and at church.

At Concordia, the preparation for Christmas is enormous. Students decorate Christmas trees and sing songs as a class. Both of these are competitions which get very intense. The cullimination of the event this year was Thursday during the week of Christmas. Students performed their songs during the day, and at night the students lit their Christmas trees for the first time.

The weather was cool, but the atmosphere was electric. Students were buzzing about their competitions both their singing and their Christmas trees. That evening after the major events were over, a group of teachers and students went out to sing Christmas carols in the neighborhood. This was my personal highlight of the entire Christmas season.

We sang songs at the 7-11 and the Family Mart Convenience store. We also went to a couple of local places that we frequent. One of these is a restaurant that we refer to as "the Curry place", because most people order curry when we go there. We also stopped at Mr. Wang's tea stand, where you can get fresh fruit tea with real fresh fruit.

It was enjoyable to walk, sing, and talk. A couple of people saw us walking and singing and motioned us to come sing in front of there house.



Their smiles and the enjoyment everyone received from our songs was amazing. They were so thankful and happy to have a group of 30 students and teachers stop by and sing a couple of songs. At every place we stopped, we handed out a small piece of paper. On the paper, written in Chinese, was a paragraph describing our joy. It said that we were happy because Jesus was born and He is our Savior. The entire evening was such a blessing. All in all we sang and walked for about an hour and a half.

If you would like to see more pictures from the Christmas season, I have new pictures on my photo's page. There you will find an album with Christmas pictures.

Until later!

Mark